The Covert Narcissist Boss: Recognizing and Surviving Workplace Narcissism
A covert narcissist boss is particularly difficult to survive because the employment relationship creates institutional protections around him that an intimate relationship doesn’t have. This article covers how to recognize covert narcissism in a manager, why standard “manage up” strategies don’t work, what repeated exposure does to your professional identity, and the practical tools. Documentation, grey rock, internal reality-maintenance. That actually protect you while you’re still in the room with him.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Maya’s Notes from the 40-Minute Meeting Were 37 Minutes of His Problems and 3 Bullet Points of Work
- What a Covert Narcissist Boss Actually Looks Like (Not the Screaming Tyrant. The Soft-Spoken One)
- The Ten Signature Behaviors of the Covert Narcissist Boss
- Why Standard “Manage Up” Strategies Fail (And Make Things Worse)
- What Repeated Exposure to a Covert Narcissist Boss Does to Your Professional Identity Over Time
- Both/And: His Management Style Is Not a Reflection of Your Competence AND You Are Still Going to Need a Strategy for Being in the Room With Him
- The Systemic Lens: Organizations That Reward Covert Narcissist Managers Have Built Systems That Select For This
- Practical Survival Strategies, Documentation Practices, and Exit Indicators
- Frequently Asked Questions
A covert narcissist boss is a manager who expresses narcissistic traits, including entitlement, exploitation, and lack of empathy, through subtle, passive, and plausibly deniable behaviors rather than the overt grandiosity of the classic narcissist. Unlike the openly self-aggrandizing boss, the covert narcissist uses victimhood, quiet undermining, triangulation, and manufactured helplessness to maintain dominance while maintaining a sympathetic public image. This makes workplace covert narcissism particularly difficult to name and address because the patterns rarely look like abuse from the outside. In my work with driven women, covert narcissist dynamics in the workplace are among the most disorienting and hardest to trust your own perception about.
In short: A covert narcissist boss uses quiet undermining, victim narratives, and plausible deniability to exercise control, making workplace narcissism harder to identify than its openly grandiose counterpart.
If nothing was ever obviously wrong but you still came out doubting your own perception, my self-paced course Clarity After the Covert is the map for what you experienced.
Across more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve worked with driven women trying to survive management by someone who left no visible evidence of harm while systematically eroding their confidence and credibility. The clinical features of covert narcissism and its workplace manifestations are described in depth by Craig Malkin, PhD (Malkin 2015).
Maya’s Notes from the 40-Minute Meeting Were 37 Minutes of His Problems and 3 Bullet Points of Work
It’s 9:51 on a Monday morning. Maya is forty-three years old and a senior product manager at a tech company in Austin. Her laptop screen has gone dark from inactivity, and she can see her own reflection in it. Still upright, still in the professional posture she’d held through the call, still sitting there seven minutes after her manager hung up. She hasn’t moved.
The call was supposed to be a project update. He’d scheduled it. He’d sent the invite with “project sync” in the subject line. For thirty-five of the forty minutes, he talked about the skip-level meeting he’d had on Friday and everything that had gone wrong in it. How he hadn’t been given credit for the Q3 metrics, how someone on the leadership team was “out to get him,” how nobody above him understood the complexity of what his team was dealing with. Maya took notes, because she always takes notes. A half-page of his complaints about his skip-level. Three bullet points of actual project content at the bottom, crammed into the final five minutes, covered in a compressed rush that felt more like an afterthought than a meeting.
She glances at those notes now. Three bullet points. She’d given that update crisply, efficiently. He’d said “great, thanks” and ended the call.
Fourteen months she has worked for this man. Fourteen months of performance reviews that all say some version of the same thing: “works too independently.” She’d spent the first three months assuming she understood what that meant and trying to fix it. More check-ins, more updates, more transparency. Then she noticed that every idea she mentioned in those check-ins appeared in his next all-hands presentation as his own. So she stopped sharing early-stage thinking. Her next review said “works too independently” again.
Sitting at her dark screen now, she thinks: Fourteen months. I have spent fourteen months trying to figure out what “works too independently” actually means in terms of behavior I can change. I think it means: give me more things to take credit for.
If you’re in Maya’s position, or if you’re sitting at your own dark screen right now trying to understand why performing harder keeps making things worse, this article is for you. What you’re describing isn’t a communication problem or a management style mismatch. It may be something that requires a completely different category of response.
What a Covert Narcissist Boss Actually Looks Like (Not the Screaming Tyrant. The Soft-Spoken One)
When most people picture a narcissistic boss, they imagine the obvious version: the executive who screams in meetings, the manager who belittles people publicly, the tyrant whose behavior is so visible that HR has a file on him. That’s overt narcissism. And while it’s damaging, it’s at least legible. Everyone in the room knows something is wrong.
The covert narcissist boss is harder to name. He doesn’t scream. He sighs. He doesn’t take credit openly; he simply presents work in a way that makes attribution ambiguous. He doesn’t attack your competence directly; he raises questions about your “communication style” and your ability to “work collaboratively.” He’s often well-liked by people above him, because he’s skilled at managing up and skilled at performing victimhood when challenged. The people who see his behavior most clearly are the ones who work closest to him, and by design, they’re also the ones with the least institutional power to name it.
Covert narcissism. Also called vulnerable or fragile narcissism. Is a subtype of Narcissistic Personality Disorder characterized by hypersensitivity to perceived slights, a chronic sense of not receiving the recognition one deserves, passive-aggressive behavior patterns, and the use of victimhood as a mechanism for control. Ramani Durvasula, PhD, clinical psychologist and professor at California State University Los Angeles, whose research focuses on narcissism in relationships and institutional settings, describes the covert narcissist as someone who “weaponizes vulnerability”. Using perceived injury to extract attention, compliance, and supply from the people around them.
In plain terms: The covert narcissist isn’t loud about needing to be the center of everything. He’s quiet about it, and that quietness is what makes him so hard to identify. You end up questioning yourself because there’s nothing dramatic enough to point at. The damage accumulates slowly, through small interactions, until one day you realize you’ve spent fourteen months trying to fix a problem that was never yours to fix.
In my work with clients who’ve had covert narcissist bosses, there’s a specific moment I hear about consistently: the moment they realize that no amount of performing better solves the problem. The reviews don’t change. The feedback doesn’t become more specific. The goalposts shift each time they’re approached. That’s the moment that usually brings someone into therapy. Not the first bad review, but the dawning recognition that the rules of this game are designed to keep them losing.
It’s worth distinguishing this from other difficult management styles. Not every demanding boss is narcissistic. What distinguishes the covert narcissist is a specific pattern: the inability to credit others, the use of the employee’s emotional investment against them, the chronic victimhood narrative, and the way feedback consistently serves his needs rather than the employee’s development. You can learn more about covert narcissism in this complete guide, which covers the clinical picture more fully.
The Ten Signature Behaviors of the Covert Narcissist Boss
Narcissistic supply is the term for the attention, admiration, and validation that a person with narcissistic traits requires to regulate their self-esteem. In a management context, supply can take many forms: credit for work done by reports, public deference in meetings, the emotional labor of managing the narcissist’s mood, or the performance of loyalty and dependence. Ramani Durvasula, PhD, has written and spoken extensively about how workplace structures. Where hierarchy is explicit and the power differential is codified. Create uniquely favorable conditions for narcissistic supply extraction.
In plain terms: Your boss isn’t just being difficult; he’s running a system. Your ideas, your attention, your willingness to explain yourself in longer and longer emails, your anxiety before 1:1s that you try not to show. All of it functions as supply. Understanding this doesn’t make you feel better immediately, but it reframes the question from “what am I doing wrong?” to “what does this system require from me and what am I willing to give?”
These are the ten behaviors that, in combination, distinguish a covert narcissist boss from someone who is simply a poor manager or a difficult personality:
1. Credit ambiguity as a consistent pattern. Your ideas appear in his presentations without attribution. It doesn’t happen once, which could be explained. It happens reliably, with plausible deniability built in. He was “inspired by our conversation,” he “took the team’s thinking in a new direction.”
2. Feedback that is consistently unmeasurable. “Works too independently.” “Needs to build relationships.” “Doesn’t communicate proactively.” None of these can be fixed because none of them are describing a real problem. They’re describing his need for supply in the language of professional development.
3. The victimhood narrative. He talks consistently about how he isn’t recognized, how leadership doesn’t understand him, how the organization is conspiring against him. You spend significant portions of your 1:1s managing his emotional state rather than managing your work. The call isn’t about the project. The call is about him.
4. Triangulation with others.** He tells you what other team members think of your work, or what his peers think of his challenges. Information flows through him, filtered by him, in ways that keep everyone slightly off-balance and slightly dependent on his account of events.
5. Passive-aggressive performance management. He doesn’t tell you directly that he’s displeased. He goes quiet. He doesn’t respond to your updates. He copies someone unexpected on an email. The punishment is indirect enough that naming it sounds paranoid.
6. Weaponized vulnerability. When challenged, even indirectly, he becomes hurt or wounded rather than defensive. This is especially effective with driven, conscientious employees who don’t want to cause harm. You end up apologizing for your own reasonable feedback.
7. The false ally positioning. He presents himself as your advocate with the organization. “I went to bat for you in that review.” This positions his support as a gift that can be withdrawn, and it makes you feel grateful for protection you may not actually be receiving.
8. Inconsistency as a control tool. Sometimes he’s warm and collegial. Sometimes he’s cold and distant. The inconsistency keeps you working to regain the warm version, which is a reliable delivery mechanism for supply.
9. Documentation that benefits only him. Meeting notes, emails, performance feedback. All tend to be constructed in ways that protect his narrative if things escalate. You may notice that written records consistently reflect his version of events.
10. Your competence as the threat. In a healthy management relationship, your competence is an asset. For the covert narcissist boss, your competence is a threat to his status. The more capable you are, the more he needs to manage your visibility. Understanding narcissistic rage in professional settings can help you recognize when competence-as-threat is escalating into something more dangerous.
Why Standard “Manage Up” Strategies Fail (And Make Things Worse)
The conventional advice for dealing with a difficult boss is some version of: communicate more clearly, understand their pressures, demonstrate your value, align your work with their priorities, and build the relationship. Reasonable advice when the problem is a skill gap. Actively counterproductive when the problem is covert narcissism.
Here’s what happens in practice: you communicate more clearly, which gives him more material to use. You understand his pressures, which means you spend more 1:1 time on his complaints. You demonstrate your value, which means you share more ideas early enough for him to present as his own. You build the relationship, which means you become more emotionally invested in his approval. And more destabilized when it’s withdrawn.
Lana, a thirty-eight-year-old director at a financial services firm, had been managing up for almost two years before she came to therapy. She’d adjusted her communication approach three separate times based on advice from an executive coach who didn’t have the full picture. “Every time I did what he asked,” she told me, “things improved for about six weeks and then went back. I thought the problem was that I wasn’t consistent enough. I didn’t understand yet that the changes were never the point.”
What Lana eventually understood, and what Maya will need to understand, is that the feedback isn’t developmental. It’s regulatory. It’s designed to keep her working on herself so she doesn’t look too clearly at him. The standard manage-up strategies fail because they’re designed for a problem that isn’t the actual problem.
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, writes about the specific mechanism by which repeated interpersonal harm distorts the victim’s self-perception. Herman’s work on complex PTSD documents what happens when someone is exposed to repeated, unpredictable relational harm in a context they can’t easily exit: they begin to organize their behavior around managing the source of harm, and they begin to attribute the harm’s ongoing presence to their own inadequacy. In occupational contexts, where the employment relationship replicates the power asymmetry of other traumatizing relationships, this distortion becomes especially entrenched. This is what working with a narcissist actually does to a person over time.
What Repeated Exposure to a Covert Narcissist Boss Does to Your Professional Identity Over Time
There’s a specific kind of damage that happens when you work for a covert narcissist boss long enough that his version of you starts to feel more real than your own. It’s not dramatic damage. It doesn’t usually look like a breakdown. It looks like a driven woman who used to trust her own judgment and no longer does.
What I see consistently in clients who’ve had this experience is a progressive narrowing of professional self-concept. In month one, she knows she’s good at her job. By month six, she’s second-guessing her ideas before she mentions them. By month fourteen, she’s framing her contributions apologetically in meetings, leading with “this might not be the right approach, but” before she says anything. The shrinking happened so gradually that she doesn’t remember when it started.
Ramani Durvasula, PhD, whose work on narcissistic relationships has helped thousands of people name what they’re experiencing, describes this process as systematic identity erosion. The covert narcissist’s feedback doesn’t attack the target directly; it operates through ambiguity, inconsistency, and the constant implication that the target needs to adjust. Over time, she internalizes the message that she is the problem. She stops offering bold ideas. She stops advocating clearly for her work. She’s managing her own expectations to match his management of her, and she calls it “being realistic.”
“Narcissistic leaders are not just a personality type found in the C-suite. They are the personality type that many organizations select for, train up, and protect until the cost to the talent around them becomes undeniable.”
MICHAEL MACCOBY, PhD, Organizational Psychologist, “Narcissistic Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, January 2000
The PTSD dimension of this is clinically real. Judith Herman, MD, whose framework for complex PTSD emerged from her work with both domestic violence survivors and political prisoners, documented that chronic exposure to interpersonal harm in a constrained relationship with a power differential produces symptoms that look more like a chronic relational injury than a single traumatic event. The anticipatory anxiety before 1:1s. The hypervigilance to his mood shifts. The intrusive rehearsing of conversations. The way a certain tone of email notification triggers a physical stress response. These aren’t signs that you’re too sensitive. They’re signs that your nervous system has been shaped by a genuinely harmful environment.
If you’re in a situation like this, working with a trauma-informed therapist is worth considering even if you’re still in the job. Having support while you’re still inside the situation is often what makes it possible to navigate it clearly rather than reactively. If you’ve been recognizing a covert narcissist in a close relationship and you’re now noticing the same patterns at work, that recognition matters. The covert narcissist boss uses many of the same mechanisms as the covert narcissist partner, with the additional institutional wrapper of the employment relationship.
Both/And: His Management Style Is Not a Reflection of Your Competence AND You Are Still Going to Need a Strategy for Being in the Room With Him
Here’s the Both/And that doesn’t make it simpler but does make it more honest: your manager’s management style is a disorder, not feedback about your professional adequacy. AND you are still required to navigate an institution that will not protect you from it. Which means the strategy has to live inside you, not inside HR.
Both parts of this are true, and neither cancels the other. The first part is about clarity. What he does with your ideas is not a performance review of your ideas. The “works too independently” feedback is not information about your professional behavior. It’s a description of how much supply you’re currently providing. Internalizing this as developmental feedback doesn’t develop you. It just makes you easier to extract from.
The second part is about pragmatics. Knowing that his behavior is a disorder doesn’t make the next Monday 9:45am call disappear. You still have to show up. You still need the job, or you need time to find the next one. HR’s mandate is to protect the organization, and a manager who performs well on organizational metrics and doesn’t have flagrant policy violations isn’t presenting a problem the organization is motivated to address.
This Both/And matters most when the two parts get collapsed. When the first part collapses, you spend the next fourteen months trying to fix feedback that was never real. When the second part collapses, you end up in a kind of righteous paralysis. Knowing it’s wrong but not quite doing anything about it. Both parts need to be held simultaneously. The clinical clarity doesn’t exempt you from needing a plan. The plan doesn’t require you to accept the premise of his feedback as valid.
What I see in my work with clients is that this Both/And is the pivot point. The moment a client can hold both truths simultaneously, “this is not about my competence” alongside “I still have to figure out what to do on Monday,” the fog starts to lift and practical strategy becomes possible. Before that moment, most of the cognitive energy goes toward trying to figure out what she’s doing wrong.
The Systemic Lens: Organizations That Reward Covert Narcissist Managers Have Built Systems That Select For This. And the Employee is Not the System’s Priority
Individual as this feels, because it happens to you in your specific meetings with this specific man, the covert narcissist boss is not an anomaly. He is, in many organizational cultures, a product.
“Narcissistic leaders are not just a personality type found in the C-suite. They are the personality type that many organizations select for, train up, and protect until the cost to the talent around them becomes undeniable.”
MICHAEL MACCOBY, PhD, Organizational Psychologist, “Narcissistic Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, January 2000
Michael Maccoby, PhD, organizational psychologist and author of “Narcissistic Leaders” in the Harvard Business Review, spent decades studying how organizations identify, promote, and protect narcissistic leaders. His argument is that the traits associated with narcissistic personality structure (an unshakeable belief in one’s own importance, resistance to criticism, a charismatic vision that overshadows others’ contributions) are precisely what many organizational promotion systems reward. Confidence reads as executive presence. Resistance to feedback reads as conviction. The organization selects for this trait set without naming it, then is genuinely confused when the talent underneath those leaders erodes.
Organizations that reward these traits are not aberrations. They are producing what their incentive systems demand, and the employees who experience the most harm are typically the most competent and the least willing to perform the supply. The employees most capable of holding the organization together are the ones least capable of playing the supply role successfully. And therefore the ones who end up in performance review language about “working too independently.”
Understanding this is protective in a particular way. It doesn’t mean the organization is malicious. It means the organization is operating according to incentives that weren’t designed with your wellbeing as a priority input. “Going to HR” isn’t going to a neutral arbiter. It’s going to a function whose mandate is organizational risk management. The question “why won’t anyone help me?” has an organizational rather than a personal answer: because you’re not the system’s asset being protected. His deliverables are.
This is especially worth understanding if you’re a driven woman in a sector that talks a great deal about psychological safety and people-first culture. The language of those values can be real. It can also be a branding layer over the same underlying incentive structures. The test is what happens to the covert narcissist manager when the cost to his team becomes visible. If the answer is “nothing, or not until the attrition numbers force it,” that’s your data.
Practical Survival Strategies, Documentation Practices, and Exit Indicators
If you’re currently working for a covert narcissist boss and you’re not yet in a position to leave, there are specific strategies that actually work. And they’re different from the manage-up advice you’ve probably already tried.
Grey rock the supply extraction. Grey rock is a strategy borrowed from the partner abuse literature: become as unrewarding as possible as a supply source. This doesn’t mean being bad at your job. It means becoming boring in the specific ways that make you less useful as supply. No early-stage ideation shared in 1:1s, no emotional reactivity to his mood shifts, no engaging with the victimhood narrative as though it requires a response. You’re present, professional, and unremarkable.
Document everything that matters in writing. Email over Slack wherever possible. If a decision is made in a meeting, follow up with a written summary: “Just confirming what we discussed. I’ll take X, you’ll take Y, the deadline is Z.” This creates attribution clarity and a record for your own reality-maintenance. When he says in your review that you “don’t communicate proactively,” you have timestamped evidence. When an idea you raised three weeks ago appears in his all-hands, you have the date you raised it.
CC strategically. Not aggressively. That will be read as a threat and escalated accordingly. But there are natural contexts in which copying appropriate stakeholders on your work output is reasonable. Use them. Direct attribution language in meetings also helps: “as I outlined in my update last Monday” said calmly creates a public record without requiring a confrontation.
Maintain your external professional identity. Keep your LinkedIn current. Stay in relationship with people who know your work from before this job and can reflect back an accurate picture of your competence. The erosion that covert narcissist bosses produce happens partly because the professional self-concept becomes dependent on a single feedback source. Diversifying that input actively resists the narrowing.
Know what HR is and isn’t for. HR can be useful if you have documented evidence of specific policy violations. Not “he makes me feel undermined”. But “on March 14 he told three team members I was on a performance improvement plan before I was notified,” with dates. If you don’t have that yet, documenting toward it is worth doing. Talking to an employment attorney before going to HR is not an overreaction. A free consultation is worth considering before you escalate internally.
Build your exit before you need it urgently. The four clearest exit indicators are: your self-doubt has started affecting your performance outside this job; the anxiety is affecting your physical health; no lateral move within the organization removes you from his scope; and the documentation trail is ready if you need it. Leaving before you’re fired, with your professional narrative intact and references from colleagues who know your actual work, is almost always the more powerful choice when those indicators are present. You can explore executive coaching as a resource for planning that transition.
Get support while you’re still inside the situation. The most important single thing: don’t wait until you’ve left to process what this has done to your professional identity. The work of rebuilding, of separating his version of you from the accurate version, is harder to do in retrospect. Working with a therapist while you’re still navigating the environment gives you a real-time reality check that the situation itself can’t provide. If you’re noticing the anxiety, the shrinking, the constant second-guessing, those are signs that support isn’t optional. Fixing the Foundations™, Annie’s course on relational trauma recovery, addresses exactly the kind of identity-level work that this situation requires.
You didn’t cause this. You can’t fix it by performing harder. And you don’t have to stay until it breaks you. But if you need to stay for now, there are ways to stay that protect your clarity and your professional future. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole ballgame.
If any of what’s described here resonates with you: the performance reviews that don’t add up, the ideas that disappear into his presentations, the months of trying to fix feedback that never gets more specific, you’re not misreading the situation. What you’re carrying is real. You deserve support that helps you carry it clearly and figure out what comes next on your terms.
Q: Should I go to HR about my narcissistic boss?
A: This depends entirely on what you have documented. HR’s mandate is to protect the organization, not the employee. Be clear-eyed about that before you walk into that conversation. If you have specific, dated evidence of policy violations (he disclosed confidential performance information to peers before you were notified; he created a hostile work environment as defined in your company’s code of conduct; he retaliated against you for a protected action), then yes, and ideally after a conversation with an employment attorney first. If what you have is “he makes me feel undermined and takes credit for my work,” that’s a harder case to make. Not because it isn’t real, but because it isn’t in policy-violation language. Build the documentation first. Then decide.
Q: Is the performance review language “works too independently” covert narcissist boss code?
A: It can be. Especially when it appears repeatedly despite your genuine efforts to address it. Covert narcissist bosses tend to use performance review language that sounds developmental but is actually about supply. “Works too independently” typically means: doesn’t run ideas by me before they’re finished, which means I can’t absorb them as mine. “Doesn’t communicate proactively” means: doesn’t give me advance information I can use in my own presentations. “Needs to build relationships” means: needs to perform more social deference to me and to my allies. “Doesn’t take feedback well” often means: challenged my narrative once. The tell is that the feedback never becomes more specific no matter how you respond to it, and the standard for meeting it seems to move every time you get close.
Q: I’ve started having anxiety before every 1:1 with my boss. Is this a trauma response?
A: Yes, likely. Anticipatory anxiety before interactions with an interpersonally unpredictable person who holds power over your livelihood is a documented stress response to a genuinely threatening environment. Your nervous system is doing what nervous systems do: scanning ahead for danger in a situation where danger has been inconsistent and hard to predict. PTSD from workplace narcissistic abuse is clinically recognized, and it doesn’t require a single dramatic event to develop. Chronic exposure to low-level relational unpredictability in a constrained context (one you can’t easily exit) is sufficient. If the anxiety is affecting your sleep, your physical health, or your confidence more broadly, that’s worth naming in therapy. The anxiety isn’t the problem. It’s the signal that something real is happening.
Q: How do I protect my work from being taken credit for?
A: Documentation is your primary tool, written over verbal wherever possible. Send a brief email summary after decisions are made in meetings: “Following up on our conversation. I’ll be moving forward with X approach by end of week.” Use direct attribution language in real time: “As I mentioned in my update last Thursday…” creates a public record without requiring a confrontation. Where possible, CC appropriate stakeholders naturally, in situations where it’s professionally reasonable for them to be in the loop. For ideas you’re still developing, share them with a broader cross-functional group before sharing with your manager, so attribution is established before he has the opportunity to absorb them. This isn’t about being combative. It’s about creating a paper trail that does the attribution work your manager won’t do.
Q: When is it time to leave?
A: Four clear indicators: your self-doubt has started affecting your performance and confidence outside this job; the anxiety is affecting your physical health consistently; no lateral move within the organization removes you from his scope of influence; and your documentation trail is in order for an employment claim if you need it. A fifth, subtler indicator: you’ve stopped being able to imagine being good at work somewhere else. That erosion of professional self-concept is serious, and it tends to accelerate the longer you stay. Leaving before you’re fired, with your own narrative intact and references from colleagues who know your actual work, is almost always the more powerful choice when these signs are present. You get to define the terms of your exit rather than have them defined for you.
Related Reading
Durvasula, Ramani. “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”: How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility. Post Hill Press, 2019.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992. Revised edition 2015.
Maccoby, Michael. “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons.” Harvard Business Review, January, February 2000. https://hbr.org/2000/01/narcissistic-leaders-the-incredible-pros-the-inevitable-cons.
Babiak, Paul, and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. HarperBusiness, 2006. Revised edition 2019.
Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela J. Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled. Wiley, 2013.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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